Anna Sokolow

Dancer and choreographer

• Born: February 9, 1910
• Birthplace: Hartford, Connecticut
• Died: March 29, 2000
• Place of death: New York, New York

As a dancer and as a choreographer, Sokolow helped develop American modern dance from the 1930’s into the end of the twentieth century.

Early Life

Anna Sokolow (SOH-koh-loh) was born in Hartford, Connecticut. Her parents, Sarah and Samuel Sokolowski (changed to Sokolow in America), left Pinsk, Russia, to escape economic and religious persecution. Samuel arrived in 1905 or 1906; Sarah and their baby, Isadore, arrived in 1907. Samuel had relatives in Hartford. He was not able to support the family, which included Rose (born in 1908), Sokolow (born in 1910), and Gertie (born in 1912). The family moved to were chosen and lived in a sixth-floor walk-up apartment with no windows. Samuel became sick with Parkinson’s disease. He moved to a hospital on Welfare Island.

Sarah went to work in the garment industry. Gertie was sent to a Jewish orphanage, not a rare decision in impoverished families. Sarah became active in unions. She took her daughters to Workman’s Circle dances, the Yiddish Theater, Central Park, and Coney Island.

By 1920, the family moved to East Eightieth Street. The girls attended elementary school and spent lunch and after-school hours at nearby Emanuel Sisterhood, a nonsectarian settlement house built by prosperous Jewish families. They had music, drama, sewing, dance, sports, and cooking classes. Rose became a weaver. In the future, she was to make costumes for Sokolow’s dances. Sokolow was attracted to dancing. She left school in her mid-teens, and her Emanuel Sisterhood teachers arranged for her to attend the Henry Street Settlement House to continue dance studies.

Samuel died in 1925. Isadore dropped out of school, worked at various jobs, returned to school, married, and became a lawyer. Gertie, back in touch with the family, also married. Sarah remarried and moved to New Jersey. Rose married artist Arnold Blank. Sokolow, Rose, and Blank stayed in Manhattan and lived in a loft with other penniless artists.

Sokolow studied with Blanche Talmud and Bird Larson, pioneers in expressive movement, at the Neighborhood Playhouse. Martha Graham and Louis Horst taught there. Sokolow became Horst’s assistant and studied with Graham. In 1929, Sokolow became a member of Graham’s company.

Life’s Work

From her first work, Anti-War Trilogy (1933), and first performances at the Ninety-second Street Young Men’s Hebrew Association(YMHA) in 1936, Sokolow established her importance as a dancer and as a choreographer. Her company, Dance Unit, and her solos, such as The Exile (1939), her first artistic reference to her Jewish roots, demonstrated her passion for social justice and for the emotional power in dance. Her work with Graham took second place and then was left behind. Case History No.‗‗ (1940), using a juvenile criminal’s movements, began her focus on those alienated from society and on gestures expressing their inner beings.

Painter Carlos Mérida invited her to Mexico in 1936 with her company. She made a contract with the Ministry of Public Education, returning that summer to create choreography for the group she trained, La Paloma Azul (the blue dove). The work was performed at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in 1940. She returned to Mexico frequently throughout her life. In 1973, she choreographed a full program for Ballet Independiente.

She performed in New York multiple times each year through the 1940’s. In 1946, she performed The Bride, set to traditional Jewish folk music, and a solo concert, including Images from the Old Testament, and Mexican Retablo.

Highlights of her theater work include choreography for Street Scene (1947), Elmer Rice’s play with music by Kurt Weill and lyrics by Langston Hughes; choreography for Regina (1949), a musical based on The Little Foxes (1939); acting as assistant director for Tennessee Williams’s Camino Real (1953); and presenting and dancing her version of S. Ansky’s The Dybbuk (1951), her last major performance as a dancer. In 1947, director Elia Kazan asked her to join the Actors Studio; Rooms (1955), a signature work, grew from experiments there. She taught actors to bring reality to their stage presence. In 1956, she choreographed New York City Center Opera’s entire season and Leonard Bernstein’s Candide. She was the original choreographer for Hair (1967), though she was dismissed from the production.

Choreographer Jerome Robbins knew of Sokolow’s work in Mexico and her dances with Jewish themes, and he suggested Sokolow’s first trip to Israel in 1953. There she worked with the Inbal Dance Theater’s Jewish dancers, singers, and musicians from Yemen. She created another performance group from her free dance classes. It performed at Tel Aviv’s Opera House in 1958, Israel’s tenth anniversary. She returned to Israel nearly every year, presenting major works, including Dreams (1961), a Holocaust statement; forming the Lyric Theater in 1962; and choreographing for the Batsheva Dance Company in 1973.

In 1954, she premiered her work, Lyric Suite, presented L’Histoire du soldat for Igor Stravinsky’s music, and created a pageant for the Hanukkah Festival for Israel at Madison Square Garden. Rooms premiered in 1955; this set of nine solo works made a sensation. Its subjects were alienation and isolation. In 1955, she created Primavera for the Juilliard School’s dance ensemble. She was on the Juilliard faculty from 1958 to 1993. Poem (1956) challenged taboos. Rather than merely suggesting love, her dancers, including Alvin Ailey, touched in ways that could have been considered homoerotic. Her intertwining groups with reaching arms influenced works by Ailey and Robbins. Session 58, made for Juilliard Dance Theater, became Opus 60 when performed in Mexico and Opus 65 for the Joffrey Ballet. It was the first “rock” ballet.

In less than two years’ time, beginning in 1965, Sokolow went to Japan as a Fulbright Fellow; worked in Israel, the Netherlands, London, Stockholm, and at Ohio State University; taught at four studios in New York; created three major works; and traveled with her company in the United States.

In the 1970’s, she created Players’ Project company. Although she disbanded Players’ Project in 1973, she later regrouped the performers. Players’ Project continued to perform her work until it ended in 2004. She continued staging her dances, choreographing, and teaching into her eighties. Sokolow died at the age of ninety at her home in New York City in 2000.

Significance

Sokolow brought reality to modern dance, using dance to reveal the struggles of urban life. She showed the isolation of the individual in society through her art, perhaps more effectively than a newspaper article or an academic treatise could do. She brought contemporary music and jazz to the concert stage with contemporary subjects. Members of her U.S., Mexican, and Israeli companies and her other students became leading dancers, choreographers, and teachers. Her works on Jewish subjects put the hardships of immigrants, Jewish traditions, and the agony of the Holocaust into art that opened the eyes and hearts of audiences. She was honored by the Ninety-second Street YMHA for “her great and prolonged record of service to the world of dance” in 1975.

Bibliography

Anderson, Jack. “Anna Sokolow, a Modern Choreographer Known for Studies in Alienation, Dies at Ninety.” The New York Times, March 30, 2000. A concise overview of her life at a time when abstraction dominated dance.

Sokolow, Anna. “The Rebel and the Bourgeois.” In The Modern Dance: Seven Statements of Belief, edited and with an introduction by Selma Jeanne Cohen. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1967. This essay first appeared in Dance Magazine in July, 1965. Sokolow’s interviews were brief and few.

Warren, Larry. Anna Sokolow: The Rebellious Spirit. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton, 1991. Authoritative biography. Includes appendixes of comments by Sokolow’s dancers and artist colleagues, chronology of choreography, and film recordings.